Art students who have been lugging art boards, canvases, paints and sketchbooks around campus for the past year may soon get some relief: new art lockers are scheduled for completion by the end of this semester.
The old art lockers have been closed for more than a year due to tagging issues and concerns about health and student safety, according to Director of the School of Art Jay Kvapil. Since the lockers’ closure in fall 2012, university officials have considered alternative storage spaces for art students.
“It’s been a long grueling process to get here, but it looks like we’re going to get all the lockers we requested and spread them out throughout the facilities,” Kvapil said.
According to Kvapil, the plans for new lockers in Fine Arts 4 have already been approved, and their installation will begin sometime around Thanksgiving. He said the prospective completion date is the end of this semester.
Once installation of lockers in FA-4 is complete, lockers in Fine Arts 3 will then be installed. Kvapil said that if any funding is left over, he hopes lockers will also be added to Fine Arts 1 and 2.
Plans for the new art lockers, projected to cost between $150,000 and $170,000, include two types of lockers: smaller compartments for paint, brushes and books as well as larger, locked flat files for canvases and similarly sized materials, according to Kvapil.
College of the Arts Senator Gregory Ruiz said the new lockers also have a resistant coating so that graffiti does not become a problem like it has in past years.
The old art lockers, which are now off limits, became a problem when students as well as outsiders began decorating the lockers, mostly with spray paint, Kvapil said. The lockers were closed due to safety concerns when local gangs began tagging the lockers.
The old art lockers had one entrance, no windows and rows of lockers that blocked most lines of sight. Kvapil said the layout and the building’s being open 24-hours a day made student safety a big concern.
“If someone were to really be hurt, we wouldn’t feel good at all,” Kvapil said.
After the art lockers’ closure, art students spoke out at Associated Students Inc. Senate meetings, and former COTA Senators Paul Suteu and Kalifa Sprowl authored a resolution that urged the university to provide art students with new lockers.
Funding and a difficult planning process, however, prolonged the installation of the new lockers, which were supposed to be in place by the beginning of the semester, Kvapil said.
“The reason I ran for office was to get the art lockers opened,” Ruiz said.
Kvapil said COTA originally looked into creating an outdoor pavilion for the art lockers but with an estimated price tag of roughly $500,000, the college could not afford it.
Though relief is approaching, art students are still burdened by the lack of locker space.
“It sucks to have to bring your artwork back and forth, two days a week when you are only going to work on them in class,” Steven Lonberger, animation major, said. “The lockers would have been really fun to see and use.”
Lonberger said as long as the new lockers have space for student supplies, he is happy with the plans.
The art department is the largest department at Cal State Long Beach with 2,000 majors and the largest school of art at a public university in the country, according to Kvapil.